The day before this interview, I ring Jilly Cooper. Or Dame Jilly, as we should more properly refer to her.
‘I’m calling to say how brilliant the Rivals adaptation is,’ I tell her.
‘Oh darling, do you think so? I could cry!’ Dame Jilly replies. ‘Rupert’s good, isn’t he?’
Rupert is the other reason I’m calling, I say, because I’m interviewing the actor playing him the following afternoon.
‘Oh darling, he’s gorgeous. Lucky you, spending tomorrow with him. They auditioned 600 people, you know.’
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Dame Jilly has written 44 books and sold millions of copies across the world. Of all the characters she’s created, Rupert Campbell-Black is the most famous. Or infamous, rather.
He’s the swaggering, shagging, showjumping antihero – at least he is when we first meet him. He likes fox-hunting, champagne, playing tennis naked and other people’s wives. He’s a Tory who, rumour has it, was partly based on Queen Camilla’s first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. He’s also blond, blue-eyed and, as Dame Jilly writes when we first come across him, ‘the handsomest man in England’.
Alex Hassell isn’t blond or blue-eyed. He is handsome, though: huge brown eyes, thick dark hair and a jawline you could crack nuts on. Smouldering is an overused cliché for romantic heroes but it feels appropriate here: Hassell smoulders.
But because he wasn’t blond, he initially decided there was ‘no point’ in auditioning for the part of Rupert in Disney’s adaptation of the 1988 bonkbuster. ‘I told my agents I wasn’t the right fit, and they said, “Please!”. So I did, assuming I’d never hear anything again. Months went by and I assumed they were looking for blond people. Then I got an email.’
Hassell as roguish Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals
Hassell was cast as a brunette Rupert (‘and they gave me a fake tan and curled eyelashes’), alongside a cast of big names including David Tennant, Aidan Turner, Victoria Smurfit and Danny Dyer, all of whom shine in the eight-part series.
A good number of Brits feel almost as strongly about Dame Jilly’s books as they do about tea and cricket, and there has been considerable anxiety about this adaptation. Earlier this year, newspaper reports suggested that ‘woke’ American Disney executives were horrified by its sex scenes and had demanded reshoots for our more puritanical, post-#MeToo age. Jilly Cooper fans across the country, myself included, groaned; joyful, unashamed romping is the whole point of her novels.
Don’t panic, because it’s all in there. Cor, it’s good. Anyone who started watching the first episodes on Disney+ this week will have set their anxieties aside: the adaptation is wickedly funny, knowing, looks sensational and is set to a fabulous 80s soundtrack. And it doesn’t feel like anything’s been toned down, since the second shot is of a naked bottom: Hassell’s, pumping merrily away in a Concorde lavatory cubicle.
It’s not a bottom double, I check, sounding like a right old perve.
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‘No, it’s my ass,’ he confirms, as we eat lunch together in a Knightsbridge hotel suite after the photo shoot. Look at me, practically on a date with Rupert Campbell-Black. All right, not really. Hassell has a lovely wife, Emma King, a fellow actor he met at drama school. They’ve been married for 14 years and, after this shoot, he’s hurrying back home to North London to help paint the bedroom in their new house. Very un-Rupert, to paint one’s own house.
Back to the nudity. There’s quite a bit of it in the first episode, as it happens. A few scenes after the bottom, there’s Hassell going full frontal, playing tennis in the buff opposite a neighbour’s wife (a magnificent Emily Atack), who is also naked. Was all this nudity uncomfortable? ‘I was aware, but it was also made clear to me that sexuality and sex was a big part of his life and world, and what I would have to be engaging in.’ So, on the day of the tennis scene, Hassell did a naked cartwheel after the first take to make everyone feel less awkward. I’m sorry to tell you this hasn’t made the final cut.
Clothes and shoes, Dior Men
There were intimacy coordinators on set (‘which is absolutely right, you have to have them these days’), which may have calmed those anxious Disney execs, too, because they were also said to be worrying about the age gap between Rupert and his teenage love interest Taggie, played with doe-eyed demureness by Bella Maclean (who you may recognise from the most recent series of Sex Education).
In the book, Rupert is in his late 30s and Taggie is just 18. In the TV adaptation, they’ve made her slightly older, no longer a teenager although, ironically, the age gap between Hassell and Maclean is even bigger – he’s 44 and she’s 26. ‘I find it difficult that, in every film you see, there’s a 40-something man with a young woman,’ he says seriously.
‘I don’t think that should be an industry standard unless it’s something to do with the story.’ Luckily, it is in this case, and it was only after a ‘chemistry’ test with Maclean that Hassell landed the role. ‘We immediately got on very well. We really had a laugh.’
Clothes and shoes, Dior Men
Did he know much about Rupert beforehand? Had he read the books? In a word: no. He’d read a few pages of the script for the audition but only finished the whole book after he’d got the part, which made him ‘nervous’ because of Rupert’s gropey behaviour, and all the sex, and some of the less, ahem, politically correct descriptions. ‘But it’s a period piece,’ he shrugs, because in TV terms the 80s are now deemed almost as long ago as the Middle Ages. ‘And it’s about the mores of that time.’
He does remember the cover of either Riders or Rivals on his parents’ bookshelves, alongside a copy of The Joy of Sex. What makes this anecdote even more delightful is that Hassell’s dad was a vicar. Although, Hassell clarifies, he’d been an accountant beforehand and ‘got his calling’ in his 20s. So perhaps Hassell Sr owned The Joy of Sex before he became a man of the cloth.
While filming a nude tennis scene, Hassell did a naked cartwheel to make everyone feel less awkward
The youngest of four siblings, Hassell had a middle-class upbringing in Southend-on-Sea, going to church on Sundays, although even as a child he was showing promising signs of exhibitionism. Aged ten, he boughta fedora from a charity shop because Bugsy Malone was his favourite film, and determinedly wore it to church. One Christmas, he insisted on sliding into the pew dressed as his favourite character from The A Team, having been given a BA Baracus outfit, ‘chains and everything’. Not a shy kid, then? He shakes his head. ‘That’s the funny thing, I am actually quite shy, but I’m much more comfortable if I know what my role is supposed to be in a social situation.’
Aged 12, watching a nativity play, it dawned on him that there were two types of people in the world: those who are watched and those watching. He decided he wanted to be in the former camp, and that was that: Hassell had caught the acting bug. As a teenager, supported by his parents, he joined the National Youth Music Theatre, alongside the likes of Sheridan Smith and Michael Jibson, before winning a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama. And after that, with his talent and brooding looks, the roles simply flowed in, right?
Clothes, Amiri. Shoes, Christian Louboutin
Well, not exactly. He has played some fairly major TV and film roles – opposite Anya Taylor-Joy in the BBC adaptation of The Miniaturist; with George Clooney in the Coen brothers-scripted film Suburbicon; and as a gangster in Netflix’s anime-influenced series Cowboy Bebop. He has also been lauded for his stage roles, notably for the RSC as Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V. But he’s not a household name like many members of the Rivals cast, and there is a sense that his big break has always been just around the corner.
I ask if he feels this. ‘I did Death of a Salesman, and there’s that great line, you “exist on a smile and a shoeshine”. That’s what the life of an actor is like, he thinks. He has doubted ‘lots and lots’, he says, and is very open about having had therapy to help with the low points when there wasn’t much work around. ‘There was quite a stretch of time when I wasn’t where I thought I’d be, or where people were suggesting I could be.’ He pauses. ‘And I found that very difficult.’
Hassell with his wife, Emma King, who he met at drama school
It’s jarring to hear an actor talk so honestly about the struggles on the way up. Has he been hard up for 20 years? ‘Yeah,’ he says, with a rueful grin. ‘It was never so hard that I couldn’t exist, but it’s been…’ He pauses again. A slog?
‘Yeah, but I want to be really careful to recognise that, while I may have looked at my career and thought, “Why isn’t it this?”, some other people may look at it and go “What the f**k are you talking about?” But it’s been quite a long time since I’ve had to have a different job.’ He worked in the reception of a since closed members’ club off The Strand for a spell; he coached other actors; during another slow patch, he set up his own Shakespearean theatre company, The Factory.
Knit, Cos. Trousers, Tod’s
How complex is Rupert, though? Playing a cad from a bonkbuster must feel quite lightweight compared to Henry V? ‘A great role is a great role,’ he replies, ‘and he [Rupert] is a big, complex, layered part.’
Hassell has talked previously about often being cast as the baddy, ‘or creepy weirdos’, which makes sense because he can look quite devilish when he’s doing all that smouldering. ‘My wife says I have resting evil face,’ he says, laughing. But perhaps that’s why he makes a more interesting Rupert and why he was cast over someone blonder and blander, because there is a brooding intensity to him.
Hassell is certainly being set up to become the nation’s new heartthrob. He didn’t study Andrew Parker Bowles for the role, but he did brush up on his riding skills, and there’s one scene in the opening episode that is clearly a homage to the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice: Rupert’s white shirt billowing as he gallops across a field towards his big posh house. Might this be his Colin-Firth-coming-out-of-the-lake moment?
Hassell and the rest of the cast clearly had a great time filming the series, which took seven months. ‘Everyone always says this, but we really were incredibly lucky with how fun it was.’ The producers, he adds, had a ‘“no c**t” rule, where they phoned up at least four people we had each worked with to find out whether we were nice people – so four references – and it really paid off.’’ He flashes a roguish smile. Ah, there it is: a flash of Rupert. Honestly, you’re going to have a ball watching him.
All episodes of Rivals are available to watch now on Disney+
Picture editor: Stephanie Belingard.
Styling: Joanne M Kennedy.
Styling assistant: Pernille Marie Anderson.
Grooming: Richard Wynne-Ellis for Joe Mills Agency using Woolf for hair and Lab Series for skin.
Thanks to Jumeirah Carlton Tower.
